Representatives of many humanitarian
organizations are attending the Rome Food Security Summit, looking for concrete
action plans to deal with hunger.

Magdalena
Kropiwnicka, food and hunger policy adviser for ActionAid, attended the opening
of the "hunger summit."

"My
impression so far is that there has been some progress in terms of actually
acknowledging the need for reforming the global governance system on food
security and the urgency with which that needs to be done," she says.

Committee on Food Security

"Over the past six months, United
Nations and all the governments who are members of the United Nations have been
working very hard on reforming the Committee on Food Security. And now this new committee," she says, "is
the first time in which the UN forum can formulate hunger eradication policies,
which also include civil society."

Despite
calling it a "very important step," she says there's no indication of how the
revised committee will be funded.

"What
is also important is that this is a single platform where all the UN food
agencies, international financial institutions, governments and civil society
can discuss and agree (on) policies on (the) global food system," she says.

The
new panel, she says, is an acknowledgement that the previous system was a
failure.

Missing G8 leaders

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President
Obama is not attending the hunger summit because he is in China. A number of other G8 leaders are absent as
well, including those from Britain, Germany and France. Those countries have sent high-level
ministers.

"Let's
remember last year in June…we had a very urgent summit due to the food price
crisis. And now," she says, there is "a
financial crisis, which has pushed an additional hundreds of thousands of
people into hunger. And yet, those
people who had showed up last year are not here."

Also
last year, G8 leaders, at the L'Aquila summit in Italy, pledged $20 billion
dollars for security.

However,
the ActionAid policy adviser says there are few details as to how that money
will be spent.

"We
also would like to see countries…prioritizing food security and establishing
national coordination mechanisms on food security between different
ministries," says Kropiwnicka.